What Are We Losing in One Piece TCG's Rotation?

Posted on April 29, 2025

On March 16th, 2025, Bandai made two important announcements for the OPTCG community; they updated to the ban list, and gave us rotation.

While the ban was impactful to the state of the game, banning cards such as Gecko Moria, Jinbe, Ice Age and Kingdom Come, format rotation is something new entirely.

After April 1st, 2026, the One Piece TCG will have two different constructed formats. The main format will have rotation, and the other will be a "Extra Regulation Tournament" for eternal play (meaning it ignores block numbers). Not a lot of information has been shared about what each format will entail and what criteria would need to be met for each one.

With that being said, at the bottom right of each One Piece card there is a small fruit icon that has a number in it. If that number has a "one" on it, that means it belongs to Block one which consist of Set 1 through 4 (Romance Dawn, Paramount War, Pillars of Strength, and Kingdom of Intrigue).

There are alot of good arguments that Rotation is healthy for a trading card game, by providing more consistent influxes of money to the company producing the game, or rotating out problem cards to shake up the meta. But, we'll save talking about the function of Rotation for a different time.

Cards from these sets will no longer be playable in tournaments as of April 2026, from what we know. Given there is a year before this rotation there are many things that could change or provide more clarity. If you possess any of these cards, you've still got time to play them at your locals. But without having any knowledge of what future sets may hold for us... I want to highlight some of the most impactful cards we will be missing after Block 1 rotates out.

We'll start off with some note-worthy leaders that will rotate out in April 2026, starting with Smoker:

He hails from the second set of the OPTCG, and Smoker enables some lower cost characters while also removing opposing characters. Smoker has seen support recently from starter decks such as ST19 which gives this leader a bit of longevity through power creep, but Smoker prevails. If you attach a DON!! to Smoker, you can choose one of your opponent's characters and give that character -1 cost. Then, if your opponent has a character with a cost of zero you give smoker +1000 power on top of the +1000 from the DON!! attached to him. This means if you can meet these requirements and your opponent has a character with a cost of zero or less your opponent would need to utilize at least +3000 in counters just to get out of an attack at their leader in most cases (Considering the standard power for a leader is 5000)

While there are plenty of leaders out there that support the Navy sub-type, Smoker is a unique leader that will be missed greatly once rotation goes into effect next year.

Another leader to take note of that will fall out of play due to rotation is Katakuri:

Katakuri is another leader, like Smoker, that was given some support from a Starter deck recently and also has a similar ability to Smokers just... much more guaranteed. Katakuri allows you to manipulate the top or bottom of your life, or your opponent's life, as long as you put a DON!! On him when attacking. After you've look at the chosen life cards, Katakuri gains +1000 power for the attack. Another leader that really requires the opponent to have +3000 counter to keep something around, but he continues to uphold potential and will be missed.

While some may rejoice, a small shout out to losing Nami as of April 2026.

There are also some non-leader cards players will miss after rotation. While there aren't a lot of cards from these earlier sets that see consistent play, there are some that have withstood the test of time. The majority of these are one cost characters with +2000 counter such as Otama, Tsuru and Kaya.